Haile Selassie, Western Education and Political Revolution in Eth ...

Chapter Two

Pattern of the Insurrection and Modernity

Many Western academic analysts blame the rampant instability and underdevelopment tribulations of the Third World on the intrinsic backward nature of the societies themselves, and not on their dependence on the metropolitan developed countries. This has been argued in many elite and modernizationist theories (e.g., Pareto, Rostow, Smelser, and Lipset).¹

A challenging view that blames the underdevelopment and the unstable nature of the Third World countries on the metropolitan nations has recently emerged. This model is commonly referred to as Dependency Theory (e.g., Baran, Dos Santos, Frank, Amin, and Wallerstein).² In both cases, however, there is still no in-depth analysis of the problem of underdevelopment and subsequent social upheavals in traditional modernizing autocracies, such as Ethiopia and Iran, both of which fell in the decade of the 1970s. This research will